Chaos is Freedom

Category: Twitter

When there is SO much news all the time, what happens when we get a little reprieve from it? You get this gem…

Homophobe Mike Pence had to swear in Kyrsten Sinema, the first out bisexual Senator in history, on a law book and not a bible. He seems uncomfortable and she’s having fun with it. This is everything. pic.twitter.com/1VxBsK1l0u

I guess posting an uneventful video and calling the Vice President a homophobe is what we do. I’ve watched the video a few times, and I see nothing strange in this video. How indoctrinated or bored must you be to post this video as “proof” Mike Pence is a homophobe? Or does the poster not care about it being proof and just wanted to claim Pence is a homophobe? I think this video would prove that he isn’t. A true homophobe would have thrown a tantrum.

People just throw these negative labels out with such whim anymore. To put this “label” of homophobic in perspective, have you ever been around someone scared of spiders? Imagine If Pence suffered from arachnophobia and Sinema were a spider, do you think he’d be smiling and be able to act professionally? The answer is no, he would be screaming and running away from her.

About 10,000,000 tweets vs 48,000 gabs. That’s the difference between “hate speech” content on Twitter vs Gab. Yet Gab is under heavy attack, by the media, because the crazed Tree of Life shooter used Gab. He also used Facebook and Twitter, yet Gab is the only one that has had all it’s support pulled. I got these figures by from the tweet found underneath, and then by finding out how many users were on each platform; 3% for Twitter, 6% for Gab.

In short, Gab doesn’t censor anyone. However there was recently an attack that they we’re letting people post child pornography, but Andrew Torba (The CEO) was posting that they certainly do boot them immediately. I would post a screenshot of him stating this, but Gab is down as of writing this. But they can’t say the site goes without moderating.

As you can see, they are not sitting idly by while being attacked. They have taken to their competitor, Twitter, so they can keep their base connected to whats going on. Which is kind of ironic that Twitter hasn’t banned them, Twitter is very heavy handed with bans.

What can we take away from this situation? Free speech is not easy, it does come with “hate” speech. But you don’t combat this by shutting them down, you have to have a better argument than them. If Gab is this big bad awful place, it will sink eventually, so why try so hard to go after their payment processor and their website host? Perhaps Gab struck a cord with it’s free speech that others need shut down? How big of a threat are they? Gab has been growing quite a bit lately, and are even seeing attacks in different form, as I mentioned the child pornography situation earlier. I don’t know much about it, but I’ll share the little I did read while it was happening. There was an organization accusing them of allowing child pornography on their site, which Gab found was not the case. Then all of a sudden, a bunch of new users were made and was posting the garbage on Gab. That’s when Torba said it wasn’t welcome and the accounts were removed immediately. Considering how closely they were working with law enforcement to provide information about the Tree of Life shooter, I’d imagine they forwarded that info to them, too. (If anyone from Gab is reading this, and this is inaccurate in anyway, please comment so I know)

To those that hate Gab – Stop attacking them if they aren’t a threat. Let them and their community grow or die on their own, and stop fanning the flames because they will rise out of the ashes, and it’s going to be a bigger fight.

Here is our full interview with @npr since they cut out 98% of what was said it would be a shame if this went viral. https://t.co/kdVHV6rICr

Since I was a young teenager, the internet has been a large part of my life. I’ve always been an avid consumer of whats on the net, I cord cut cable before it was cool, I played MMOs that were text based before World of Warcraft, I’ve digitized my DVD library before streaming services came around, I even used my PC to text my friends before smart phones were big. I’ve always been big into tech and gadgets, and there has been very few times in my life I wasn’t connected to the internet. Now I have two discord servers, Twitter, Facebook, Gab, PlayStation, Xbox Live and steam, all with different friends, and different people contacting me all the time. I haven’t even watched a YouTube video. I don’t really use Facebook anymore, it’s pretty much there for personal friends to contact me. All the others I use pseudo-names, mostly to keep my family from being harassed, and the anonymity lets me express things I normally would filter. For example, I’m pretty politically open on Twitter, but not on Facebook, for reasons like those found here.

Well for the last two weeks, I didn’t log into any of those (with the exception of my PlayStation, but I didn’t play any social games like Warframe like I normally do). You could call it a internet cleanse, and I honestly don’t really want to go back to being a heavy user of some of these services like I used to be. I feel a lot less stressed, I am more focused at work, I feel more positive and motivated everyday. The constant barrage of news seems to have caused such a drain on my mental state prior to these last couple weeks. And what did I miss? People are still freaking out about the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS nomination. People are still freaking out that Trump is the President. Everyone is still a racist and Russian bot. Nothing has changed, all the outrage is still there, yet I feel better and happier.

I’m here to proclaim that news fatigue is real, and everyone should do themselves a favor and take some time out of Social Networks. Use the time to meditate, clean your room, ask your spouse some questions, play with your kids, talk with your parents. There are more pressing issues in life than what Trump tweets.

Twitter, the final holdout of the big tech companies, has finally banned Alex Jones and Infowars. But that isn’t what we are going to talk about today. I want to discuss what they are really doing when they ban people like Alex Jones from their platforms – They know better than you. It is truly silly to ban people from, especially, Twitter, because they have mute and block buttons already, why does the company have to go that extra mile and erase people? It makes no sense when you think of the “publisher” or “platform” problem they may soon face. if they are publishers, they are responsible for everything content creators make and push on their sites. So if someone tried to sue Twitter for something Alex Jones does, than Twitter would have to take responsibility and cover him under their legal umbrella. So, as a publisher, it would make sense if they ban Infowars. But as a platform, which is what Facebook, YouTube and Twitter claim to be, they are not there to police people and anything they do they are not responsible for. Which is the way it should be, but does that give them the right to ban Infowars? Absolutely, but it’s a mistake, they will lose the trust of people if they police content they disagree with, instead of letting us use the tools they give us, to either elevate them or block them. They do this, because they know better than you. Free speech needs to stay alive, and the big tech companies need to stay neutral, or our internet as we know it, is gone.

Twitter was meeting with congress about censors on it’s network. They’ve been under a lot of heat recently for suppressing conservatives. But that isn’t what we are here to talk about today. During the hearing, this happened…

Am I crazy, or was this one of the worst ways to deal with a protester? Drown out the protester by doing an auction? One example is she can now claim sexual harassment for him trying to sell her, I hear this #MeToo thing is big. Also the irony, this hearing was about Twitter shutting down conservative voices, and he shut her voice down with an auction?

The woman yelling is Laura Loomer. Shes an undercover journalist who clearly isn’t shy about confronting people. She also recently confronted Maxine Waters for inciting violence against Trump supporters. She also happens to be another person labeled alt and far right, which drives me crazy because they are using these words for the singular purpose to label someone discredited, and not their true meaning. Far right really means nothing, but “alt” right is directly coined by Richard Spencer. I have not done the research myself on him, so I will not attribute any labels to him. To me, to be considered alt-right, is something you would have to sign up for, or be a follower of Richard Spencer.

Since this incident at congress, it would appear that Twitter is taking a strange offensive tactic with Laura.

We have two very strange scenarios here. Either Loomer is actively reporting articles and people that support her, or Twitter is reporting them… for her? This seems like a strange way to retaliate since I don’t think Twitter tells people who reported them. This is going to be a very interesting fight, and both scenarios are quite damning.

A lot of criticism is being thrown at Twitter, Facebook and Google due to their recent supression of conservative voices. This is where Gab comes in, a place where “The storytellers will not be silenced”. They started in 2016, and recently hit the 600,000 user milestone, reaching for 700,000 soon. Google and Apple have already put their foots down on Gab, and will not allow their mobile app into their respective app stores. Per the nypost.com, Google has cited hate speech for their reason for not listing the app.

The largest criticism of Gab is that it is a place where Nazi’s and white supremacists gather and spread hate speech. But if you are a free thinker, you’ll notice these people don’t have anywhere else to go. If they are pushed off one platform, they will go to another, or underground, and then their thoughts will fester and that’s how you get criminals. Banning them isn’t the way to get rid of them, it’s the exchange of ideas and to convince them they’re ideas are terrible. I’ve been on there for a couple weeks, and I have noticed a few people that think white people should reign supreme, but for the most part, its a bunch of people who want someone to talk about the things Trump is doing, and fighting back against anti-white Twitter. I don’t care what the color of your skin is, it’s the content of your character that I care about. I say anti-white because there are a lot of people, like @VerifiedHate, that screenshots “blue checks” from twitter that spew anti-white rhetoric. Which for those keeping racists tabs, is a form of racism. Even so, if you have any issues with anyone on there, you have full control to mute people to tailor your experience. For the record, Twitter also has this feature, but with their “Quality Filter” most people don’t even get seen anymore.

Speaking of the Quality Filter, it was originally something you had to turn on, but at some point they thought it was SO GREAT that they decided to turn it on for everyone. After turning mine off, I started seeing people again… WEIRD! The screen shot below was taken from their blog.

Gab is absolutely dedicated to the idea of free speech, which is what I love about it. The problem for Gab seems to be the lack of influential people, such as celebrities, politicians or large companies such as Amazon or McDonald’s. It’s more of a place to mingle with everyday Joe’s like you and me, and again, if you find some disgusting person you cannot stand, mute them and poof, they are gone. There are a bunch of accounts like @RealTrumpTweets that mirrors the tweets of whoever that account is about. So every time Trump tweets something, the @RealTrumpTweets account “Gabs” it. Its unfortunate that the comments and criticism never reach the actual person though. Which could be a good thing, going to Trump’s comment section in Twitter is the most irritating thing you can do on there.

The last thing I want to point out about Gab is their frog logo. Is it me, or did they chose a frog on purpose because of Pepe the frog? The accusation of them both being a thing for white supremacy seems a little too coincidental. Pepe is not a symbol of white supremacy!

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